Bonegilla was Australia's first and largest migrant reception centre in the years after World War II.

It appeared an unpromising place when its gates opened to the first immigrants and refugees to arrive from a smashed Europe in November 1947.

Rows of huts spread across a landscape enclosed with barbed wire. Formerly an Army base, it looked to some fearful eyes to bear too close a resemblance to a concentration camp.

Residents at the Bonegilla camp get their bearings.

The emptiness all around was dizzying to those fresh from crowded cities and towns in little European countries. Bonegilla was nothing but a camp in a paddock in the middle of nowhere at the end of a 300-kilometre train trip from the docks of Melbourne.

And yet, 70 years after the beginning of this exercise by Australia's leaders in nation-building and, for those who came from across the globe, this leap into the unknown, Bonegilla remains fixed as a beacon in the Australian story.

Three children from Czechoslovakia - nine-year-old Gabriela, seven-year-old Maria and four-year-old Alexander Babarczy - arrive in Australia in November 1949.Credit:Fairfax Media

From 1947 until the migrant camp closed in 1971, more than 300,000 people came, baking in the corrugated iron huts in summer and freezing in winter.

There is but a single "block" of a couple of dozen of those first huts left now - Block 19, it is called. Once, there were 24 such blocks - some for single men, some for single women, some for families, plus recreation halls and kitchens and laundries and ablution blocks.

Wirner Baumann, 24, from Estonia, and Erica Elksmis, 22, from Latvia, who married at the Bonegilla camp - the first of the Baltic migrants to do so - in December 1947.

English was taught in makeshift classrooms, for the policy was that migrants should assimilate into their new country. Children were cautioned not to speak their families' old languages when they left the camp, for it would mark them as different. Southern Europeans were told not to wave their hands about when they were speaking, for it would draw attention to them.

Bonegilla, of course, closed one year before the Whitlam government embraced the policy of multiculturalism. It was a long time ago in all sorts of ways.

Almost 40 years ago, gathering stories for a newspaper series about Bonegilla, I met a man who recalled that, unable to read English when he arrived, he copied the words and numbers stencilled on his roof, believing this was his new Australian address. And so letters from his family in Europe came addressed to "Keep Off the Roof, Hut 29, Block 15".

The Bonegilla camp was abandoned when I wrote that series in 1979, its remaining huts in danger of being bulldozed. The nation seemed content to forget that this was a site of great significance in the Australian story.

There has been much written, filmed and recorded about Bonegilla since then, and new generations, raised at a time when border protection gets more headlines than immigration, have become nostalgic

Bruce Pennay, associate professor and historian at Charles Sturt University, has been among the most assiduous in collecting and interpreting the mountain of stories from the old place.

For those tempted to take a misty-eyed view of the camp, Pennay's work reminds us that even then, immigration was a fraught matter.

A demonstration at Bonegilla over the lack of work in July 1961 was followed by rioting.

In 1949, 13 children died in Bonegilla from the effects of malnutrition, and by early the following year, the number had risen to 21. Fingers were pointed at shipping agents, parents, immigration authorities and conditions in Europe, and journalists - who had previously been encouraged to write about "the beautiful Balts" who had been handpicked as the first arrivals - were suddenly banned from the migrant camp.

In 1952 and again in 1961, riots broke out when Australia suffered work shortages and young men felt trapped.The Army was put on alert and armoured personnel carriers drove around the camp.

Many who came were highly skilled in the trades, the professions and the arts. Regardless, the men were offered work as labourers, the women as domestics.

And yet, all these years later, the families of many who came this way return to claim a sort of Australian immortality.

Can anyone imagine that honour ever being accorded to Manus Island or Nauru?

Picturing and Re-Picturing Bonegilla by Bruce Pennay is available from Wodonga City Council for $30 + $5 postage.